Search results for " Protected area"
showing 10 items of 127 documents
Quotas regulation is necessary but not sufficient to mitigate the impact of SCUBA diving in a highly visited marine protected area.
2021
Abstract When effectively managed, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can produce wide ecosystem benefits that can foster, directly and indirectly, local economies. Tourism is one of the sectors mainly benefited by the effect of conservation. SCUBA diving represents an important tourism activity, especially in the context of MPAs, where it is one of the few activities often fostered rather than limited, for its capacity to integrate environmental and socio-economic sustainability. However, SCUBA diving can also produce negative impacts on the environment when tourism frequentation exceeds a sustainable threshold, these potentially generating negative effects on the sector itself. In this study, …
No evidence of systematic pre-emptive loggings after notifying landowners of their lands’ conservation potential
2020
Landowners can intentionally impair biodiversity values occurring on their land to pre-empt biodiversity protection. This often leads to significant negative effects on biodiversity. We studied whether landowners in Finland engaged in pre-emptive loggings after they were notified that their wooded mires are candidate sites for a mire protection program. After the notification, harvesting rates of the candidate wooded mires were significantly lower compared to harvesting rates of similar but non-candidate wooded mires. Annual and monthly harvesting rates indicated that notifying landowners of the conservation potential did not launch systematic pre-emptive logging behavior. Nevertheless, par…
Italian marine reserve effectiveness: does enforcement matter?
2008
Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become popular tools worldwide for ecosystem conservation and fishery management. Fish assemblages can benefit from protection provided by MPAs, especially those that include fully no-take reserves. Fish response to protection can thus be used to evaluate the effectiveness of marine reserves. Most target fish are high-level predators and their overfishing may affect entire communities through trophic cascades. In the Mediterranean rocky sublittoral, marine reserves may allow fish predators of sea urchins to recover and thus whole communities to be restored from coralline barrens to macroalgae. Such direct and indirect reserve effects, however, are likely t…
Predictive habitat suitability models to aid the conservation of elasmobranchs in Isla del Coco National Park (Costa Rica)
2021
Abstract Worldwide there is increasing concern for elasmobranch species given that their biological and ecological characteristics make them highly vulnerable to fishing pressure. The disappearance of these species could affect the structure and function of marine ecosystems, which would induce changes in trophic interactions at the community level. For effective conservation and management of elasmobranchs detailed knowledge of their habitat preferences is essential. Yet, there is a poor understanding of their spatial ecology. Isla del Coco National Park is an oceanic island in Pacific Costa Rica and renowned for being a sanctuary for migratory pelagic species, such as elasmobranchs and ot…
Analisi del DNA genomico nucleare di popolamenti a Cystoseira spp. nell’Area Marina Protetta di Capo Gallo-Isola delle Femmine (Sicilia nord-occident…
2008
In this preliminary study we report the first observations on nuclear DNA analysis of Cystoseira populations at Capo Gallo - Isola delle Femmine MPA (north-western Sicily). Some specific bands resulted from the DNA extraction of 2 species even though aspecific bands, probably due to polysaccarides and microendophytes were also highlighted.
Protected areas and species: the Mediterranean Basin
1995
Éste es un estudio de Derecho internacional sobre la protección de zonas y especies en el Mar Mediterráneo. En este trabajo examino los tratados internacionales relativos a zonas especialmente protegidas y a la diversidad biológica que son aplicables en el Mar Mediterráneo. Tras una breve introducción, en la sección II analizo aquellos tratados internacionales que en esta materia son aplicables al Mar Mediterráneo, aunque expresamente no se limitan sólo al mismo. En la sección III, realizo una mención especial al enfoque y a la evolución que, sobre estas materias, se contienen en los instrumentos mediterráneos de naturaleza tanto política como jurídica. This is an International Law study on…
Cultural and socio-economic impacts of Mediterranean marine protected areas
2000
Marine protected areas (MPAs) may be important for protecting the marine environment, but they may also have substantial socio-cultural impacts about which very little is currently known, or acknowledged. In the Mediterranean, few data are available on the socio-economic consequences of MPAs. The present study reviews the existing data on MPAs in Spain, France, Italy and Greece. A general increase in tourist activities in Mediterranean MPAs is evident, as are increases in the abundances of larger fish species, although there are no data indicating yields for fisheries increase adjacent to MPAs. A large increase in the number of divers and vessels using MPAs has already had impacts on natura…
Connected Lands : new perspectives on Ecological Networks Planning
2017
The construction of an ecological network is a fairly complex operation, given that the components to be considered are strictly linked to the age-old problem of the relationship between man and the land, until now perhaps seen too much as a limiting relationship and not, as the use of this tool suggests, as a relationship to be safeguarded. It may represent the ideal way to reconcile human needs and the conservation of biodiversity for the sustainable management of land. This study on the ecological network represents a tool capable to contain habitat fragmentation trough a new perspective that integrates theoretical approaches and methods with planning models and experiences of local appl…
Dispersal of larval and juvenile seabream: Implications for Mediterranean marine protected areas
2015
International audience; In the marine context, information about dispersal is essential for the design of networks of marine protected areas (MPAs). Generally, most of the dispersal of demersal fishes is thought to be driven by the transport of eggs and larvae in currents, with the potential contribution of dispersal in later life stages relatively minimal.Using otolith chemistry analyses, we estimate dispersal patterns across a spatial scale of approximately 180 km at both propagule (i.e. eggs and larvae) and juvenile (i.e. between settlement and recruitment) stages of a Mediterranean coastal fishery species, the two-banded seabream Diplodus vulgaris. We detected three major natal sources …
Effects of fish feeding by snorkellers on the density and size distribution of fishes in a Mediterranean marine protected area
2005
Although there is a great deal of evidence to show that supplementary feeding by humans in terrestrial environments causes pronounced changes in the distribution and behaviour of wild animals, at present very little is known about the potential for such effects on marine fish. This study evaluated the consequences of feeding by snorkellers on fish assemblages in the no-take area of the Ustica Island marine protected area (MPA; western Mediterranean) by (1) determining if reef fish assemblage structure is affected in space and time by tourists feeding the fish; (2) assessing the effects of feeding on the abundance of the most common fish species; and (3) assessing the effects of feeding on t…